Not very obvious but sound controls moved in v5.6.0

• Options→Ships→AIS: enable “Play sound on AIS……”
• Then in Options→User interface→Sounds: Enable [x] “Play sound on AIS alert”.
• Select another sound file if desired.
• The “Test” button is here as well.

Enable thw WMM World Magnetic Model please.

It makes no sense to use magnetic on true north facing mercator projections.

Ownship true north heading predictor is only displayed if true north value is available.

If HDT is not available in the nmea data stream we use HDM and variation from the WMM plugin to estimate an effective HDT.

• A disabled plugin, whether managed or un-managed, does not get loaded, and cannot be responsible for performance deterioration at run-time.
• There is some very small cost involved in inspection of all available plugins, enabled or not, during OCPN startup. This is a transient, probably 50 msec. or so.
• If you are having performance problems, look to the graphics system. Are you using OpenGL?

See this CF Thread

1. Solution 1: No need to edit registry. Works for all versions of Windows.
2. Open device manager. (usually through control panel.)
3. Expand “Ports (COM and LPT)”
4. Right click on the port that is messing up the mouse and click properties.
5. Click Port settings→Advanced and turn Serial Enumerator off.
6. It should be ok to turn Serial Enumerator off on everything except the actual mouse.
7. If the mouse not working, how can it be possible to do the above? Good question: Do this when the effect is intermittant.

Solution 2: Disable Serial Mouse Detection

The scale jumps appear very large. I have looked but cannot find a pref or other setting. It may be due to the scales of raster charts.

• Is it a driver problem? Does this happen in other programs.
• Is the battery low?
• Options > Display, check “Smooth Pan/Zooming”. It helps make zooming and panning much more controllable.
• Options > Display, check “Preserve scale when switching charts”.

Behavior: Expected -chart zooms in / out ONE level Actual -chart zooms in / out a crazy amount; mouse zooms 10 levels in / out Turn on Options > Display > General > Smooth Panning/Zooming

• Is Auto Follow enabled? In the upper left corner to MenuBar, “Navigate” drop down, and check “Auto follow”.
• Or to enable Auto Follow, use Ctrl-A.

• If you pan the boat off-screen, auto-follow is automatically switched off.
• Do you have the GPS connected and working?
• Does the GPS indicator in the upper right show good green signals and operational GPS?
• In the NMEA debug window (Options|Communication), do you observe a continuous data stream or does it stall?
• Do you have regular repeating GLL or GGA messages?
• Version 5 has a new feature panning the chart, the relative position of the boat “sticks”. The boat snaps back to center when you turn auto-center OFF, which at first is confusing.

• Without tweaks, Yes!
• Tweak: In config file: [Settings] add/set: MaxZoomScale=800 or what you want “up” to 50. (1:50)

• Go to the Toolbox and enable “Zoom to Cursor” on the Display→General tab

In Tools→User interface you can select to collapse the bar after a given time and further down adjust the size with the slider “User Interface scale factor”. Color and location are though not adjustable. Dark grey on black is OK at night but in bright sun the icons are just not visible. For the same reason, you can change the status bar default black text on grey to white. === Why doesn't the plugin work? === - See Plugin API Versions - It is best to keep OpenCPN and plugins updated to the most current version. - If you are having trouble, it is likely you will be asked to update plugins and Opencpn to be current.

Apparently sometimes Toobar works and sometimes not. When the toolbar is not visible, the problem is that ocpnToolbarDialog was created with very small dimensions. See Github Issue #820 for how to edit the config file.

• Windows 10-11 or other OS: Set font size to 250%
• Check Enable scaled graphics Interface
• General Options User Interface scale factor -3
• General Options Chart Object scale factor +1
• Ship Scale Factor -1 about
• See CF Post #3223

How do I adjust scale factor for Ship and AIS, Chart Objects and the User Interface? Adjust the Three Scale Factors Adjust how large the User Interface is. Adjust how large Ships and AIS symbols are. Adjust how large Chart Objects and vector depth sounding are.

Solution: Set the AIS targets to be shown scaled, in Settings > User Interface and near the bottom are sliders for scaling items. Use ship scale at 2 or 3 gets a nice sized AIS target. The Scale sliders were added for greater user control in the new version.

Tried the following:

1. Check setting Tools→Display→Advanced→Physical screen width. If not already Auto select that and Apply. Now read the mm value and compare to your screen width. If it does not conform, change to “manual” and enter your actual size.
2. Changing options such as “Ship icon type” and can get the ship icon back to readable size by changing the option from default to Real Scale Bitmap and setting the mm size to 30 but this does not change the AIS target size.
3. Checked setting for “Physical screen width”. Tools→Display→Advanced→Physical screen width. If not already “Auto” select that and “Apply”. Now read the mm value and compare to your screen width. If it not conform change to “manual” and enter your actual size.
4. Show AIS targets as real size does not help.
5. Note: The external monitor can be forced to display the correct sized icons by first enabling both the laptop display and the external monitor and then disabling the laptop display.
6. Also check Settings→Display→Advanced→Physical screen width. Does it match your actual device screen width in mm? When set to “Auto” the default Icon sizes should be reasonable when the Scale sliders are set to around 5 (midrange). See Settings > User Interface and the three Scale Sliders at the bottom here Adjust the Three Scale Factors

Out of the box, the “Depth” notation is unreadable.

• Try Options > User Interface > Chart Object Scale Slider set on +4 or +5.
• Try using the Swedish color palette which changes depth font to black.
• The Chart Object Scale Slider is for Vector Charts only.
• Raster Chart cartography is superior and depths are very clear in comparision.

* See Options > User Interface Fonts and Font Color.

* Toolbox → User Interface → Fonts dropdown - Console Legend/Console Value, select whatever fonts and colors you want.

* Close Opencpn. * In the Opencpn.ini or opencpn.conf file find DefaultFontSize=0 under the [Settings] section, just below ShowMenuBar=0 * Change the defaultfontsize setting to the font size you would like use and save the file. * Load Opencpn and check your font sizes.

* The AIS Target List does not exist in UI > Options Fonts selection. AIS target list uses the “Dialog” font key in Options > User Interface, Fonts and Font Color..

'Enable Touchscreen interface' in Options/User Interface disables the rollover feature on my PC with a touchscreen. With this setting enabled, touching a target displays the target information. Without it enabled the rollover feature works.

“Rollover” is a mouse thing. One does not exactly “rollover” with a touchscreen. This could get very distracting to the overall UI. Thus, rollover is disabled for touch.

See FAQ above, OpenCPN supports some Touchscreen, however there is an totally independent development and special BETA version available that needs testing. See Cruiser Forum Thread Open CPN on a Touchscreen?

A user can install his or her own icons to use with marks and “own ship”. See Install your own Icons “To replace the default own ship icon, red ship icon just put a file “ownship.xpm” or “ownship.png” in the UserIcons directory.”

Add a Boat Position waypoint

[Settings]
SpaceDropMark=1

to the opencpn.ini file you get at the boat position every time you press the space-bar.

See Moving Options Menu, shifts to and changes Opencpn Window-Min- Max in Ubuntu 18.04 #1787 A Desktop Manager workaround is required. Not possible to change behavior in OCPN.

For Ubuntu 18.04, Gnome desktop: One should install the package “Gnome Tweaks”, and change the setting “Windows→AttachModalDialogs” to OFF.

1. Start OCPN. Set the toolbar as you would like it. No dashboard visible yet.
2. Grab a screenshot.
3. Exit OCPN cleanly by closing the Opencpn window normally. Restart and the settings should be saved.
4. Using the Raspberry Pi shutdown, top left corner, select shutdown, is wrong, like instant stop.
5. See Forum Thread

Issue just started with 4.8.0 where on exit doesn't save * Units * Configuration of toolbar * Starts in night mode I searched the opencpn.ini for these settings but not sure what I am looking for TBH. I also backed up this file and exited the program forming a new ini file, same issue. Any ideas?

OpenCPN is probably set to use settings for Inland ECDIS European Inland Waterways ECDIS

• Click the wrench (or spanner) icon on toolbar to open the “Settings” dialog.
• Select the “User Interface” tab, and
• look below the “Interface Options” for
• “Use Settings for Inland ECDIS Version 2.3”.
• Remove the checkmark on the “Use … Inland ECDIS…” line.

Distorted sound

• The wav file MUST be 16 bit, mono 22050 Hz in order to play correctly. I've converted the sounds from mp3 to wav using:

mpg123 -2 -m -w out.wav in.mp3 This is on a Raspberry PI using OpenPlotter 1.1.0 alpha)

No Sound in RPI:

• Disable the onboard audio in /boot/config.txt, edit files /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf and /etc/asound.conf to point to card 1 (my USB speaker as shown in response to “aplay -l”.
• Change Tools > Options > User Interface > Sound Device Index to 1 and the result is Watchdog and AIS test alarms work fine.

RPI 3B+ is running now for several hours with OpenCPN and chart open. No more locks ups or screen errors. VC4 driver on and in OpenCPN also OpenGL to on. Fast screen movements. Something seems to go wrong with the auto screen detection in OpenCPN. Use manual screen settings to set the proper display size. Back to kernel 4.14.62 ( 4.14.68 kernel and 4.14.69 and 67 seems to have also a memory leak) the system is runs all day without problems and with OpenGL switched on. Screen is an DVI with a conversion plug DVI > HDMI.

Going to Toolbar/Options/Plugins/Grib 4.1/Preferences; OpenCPN freezes when you check “Authorize interpolation to start at current time” (a warning first followed by a freeze requiring a “Force Quit” of the application).

• It is not frozen, but the active modal window with the preferences sinks below the other windows as the information message dialog is displayed. Cmd-Tab to switch to another application followed by another Cmd-Tab to switch back to OpenCPN should bring it back on top (Or an Esc acts as Cancel). Certainly to be fixed with all the other z-order issues on macOS.

Set time to local for weather routing in view→settings. Set time to local for grib_pi in preferences.

• In Windows, Night, F5, mode. The title bar on the floating plugin window is a bit glaring (this mode is controlled by windows by way of a theme and is not possible to change from an application) .
• The best solution is to simply “dock” the dashboard window at night, either left or right. This brings the window decorations back under OCPN control, and we recently added logic to dim it in this mode.
• Dimming the screen, if it is available and goes far enough is often best. F6 General Dimming, in steps, of the entire Screen. (except Mac OS X ). OpenGL must be off.
• Otherwise the “Change color scheme' F5 button or (C, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+G). This may or may not work on your particular computer.
• See Keyboard Shortcuts
• For Linux users, who have little differentiation between shallow water colurs and land colours, try “F.Lux” which has a 2000k setting that makes the screen quite dull over the daytime colour palette. F.lux is confirmed as massive win on Linux. Daytime palette and use F7 to drop the brightness a bit more if needed. https://itsfoss.com/night-shift-flux-ubuntu-linux/
• Do you need the menu? Under Options | User Interface you can disable the interface.
• Why don't you change the windows colors? The menu bar follows the general user interface settings of Windows/MacOS/Linux. You can choose a dark user interface with a dark header and menu bar if you want.
• See CF Opencpn too bright at night

Read this.

• Create new registry entry here: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM
• Create a new item called AccentColorInactive and assign it the value 0xff0f0f0f.